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Kyle Fowler is a self-taught developer who turned his hobby of sports card collecting into two highly profitable mobile apps—Cardstock (for sports cards) and Scanon (for Pokémon cards)—which together generate over $120,000 in monthly recurring revenue, proving that solving your own personal problems can build a million-dollar business.
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Products and Offerings
- Cardstock: A sports card value scanner that uses a phone’s camera to identify cards, look up market values, and track collections over time.
- Scanon: A sister app built on the same concept but specifically for Pokémon cards, launched in 2025.
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Metrics and Financials
- Combined revenue: Over $120,000 in monthly recurring revenue ($1.5 million annually).
- Cardstock metrics: Approximately 15,000 active subscriptions, $75,000 MRR, and 13,000 monthly downloads.
- Scanon metrics: Approximately 3,400 active subscriptions, $17,000 MRR, and 16,000 new customers a month.
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Strategy and Growth
- Idea generation: Build apps around your own hobbies and personal problems; if you lack ideas, you are not paying close enough attention to slow, repetitive tasks in your daily life.
- Playbook for finding a $1M app idea:
- Find a problem or opportunity by keeping a running notes document of daily friction points.
- Determine the most minimal solution that solves the problem.
- Build it—AI has made app development significantly easier and faster than most people realize.
- Monetize using tools like Superwall or RevenueCat, which AI can largely implement and configure.
- Marketing in 2026: Rely heavily on TikTok slideshows; find a repeatable format that balances views and conversions, then scale distribution using Noise, a platform that pays creators per view to post slideshow templates.
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Tech Stack and Infrastructure
- Cardstock: Built natively using Swift and SwiftUI, with Core Data for local storage and an AWS EC2 server for the backend card database; integrated RevenueCat for subscriptions.
- Scanon: Built in a single day using Cursor’s AI agent to generate the MVP.
- General tools used: ChatGPT, Notion, Cursor, Slack, Framer, Claude, Supabase, Railway, CodeRabbit, WhisperFlow, and Granola.
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Lessons and Advice
- Solving a problem for yourself guarantees a personal win regardless of financial success; if the problem is real to you, it is likely real to others.
- Do not overthink the process—building and marketing does not have to be complicated.
- People who are successful are usually happy to share how they did it; do not be afraid to reach out and ask for help.